Who s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf (1966)

June 24, 1966

Screen: Funless Games at George and Martha's:Albee's 'Virginia Woolf' Becomes a Film

By STANLEY KAUFFMANN

Published: June 24, 1966

EDWARD ALBEE'S "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", the best American play of the last decade and a violently candid one, has been brought to the screen without pussyfooting. (It is now at the Criterion and Loew's Tower East.) This in itself makes it a notable event in our film history. About the film as such, there is more to be said.

First things first. The most pressing question—since we already know a great deal about the play and the two stars—is the direction. Mike Nichols, after a brilliant and too-brief career as a satirist, proved to be a brilliant theatrical director of comedy. This is his debut as a film director, and it is a successful Houdini feat.

Houdini, you remember, was the magician who was chained hand and foot, bound in a sack, dumped in a river, and then appeared some minutes later on the surface. You do not expect Olympic swimming form in a Houdini; the triumph is just to come out alive.

Which Mr. Nichols has done. He was given two world-shaking stars, the play of the decade and the auspices of a large looming studio. What more inhibiting conditions could be imagined for a first film, if the director is a man of talent? But Mr. Nichols has at least survived. The form is not Olympic, but he lives.

Any transference of a good play to film is a battle. (Which is why the best film directors rarely deal with good plays.) The better the play, the harder it struggles against leaving its natural habitat, and Mr. Albee's extraordinary comedy-drama has put up a stiff fight.

Ernest Lehman, the screen adapter, has broken the play out of its one living-room setting into various rooms in the house and onto the lawn, which the play accepts well enough. He has also placed one scene in a roadhouse, which is a patently forced move for visual variety. These changes and some minor cuts, including a little inconsequential blue-penciling, are about the sum of his efforts. The real job of "filmizing" was left to the director.

With no possible chance to cut loose cinematically (as, for example, Richard Lester did in his film of the stage comedy "The Knack"), Mr. Nichols has made the most of two elements that were left to him—intimacy and acting.

He has gone to school to several film masters (Kurosawa among them, I would guess) in the skills of keeping the camera close, indecently prying; giving us a sense of his characters' very breath, bad 'breath, held breath; tracking a face—in the rhythm of the scene—as the actor moves, to take us to other faces; punctuating with sudden withdrawals to give us a brief, almost dispassionate respite; then plunging us in close again to one or two faces, for lots of pores and bile.

There is not much that is original in Mr. Nichols's camerawork, no sense of the personality that we got in his stage direction. In fact, the direction is weakest when he gets a bit arty: electric signs flashing behind heads or tilted shots from below to show passion and abandon (both of them hallmarks of the college cinema virtuoso). But he has minimized the "stage" feeling, and he has given the film an insistent presence, good phrasing and a nervous drive. It sags toward the end, but this is because the third act of the play sags.

As for the acting, Mr. Nichols had Richard Burton as George. (To refresh us all, George is a fortyish history professor, married to Martha, the daughter of the president of a New England college. They return home from a party at 1:30 A.M., slightly sozzled, drenched in their 20-year-old marital love-hate ambivalence. A young faculty couple come over for drinks, and the party winds viciously on until dawn. In the course of it, Martha sleeps with the young man as an act of vengeance on George. The play ends with George's retribution—the destruction of their myth about a son they never had.

Mr. Burton was part of the star package with which this film began, but—a big but—Mr. Burton is also an actor. He has become a kind of specialist in sensitive self-disgust, as witness the latter scenes of "Cleopatra" and all of "The Spy Who Came In from the Cold," and he does it well. He is not in his person the George we might imagine, but he is utterly convincing as a man with a great lake of nausea in him, on which he sails with regret and compulsive amusement.

On past evidence, Mr. Nichols had relatively little work to do with Mr. Burton. On past evidence, he had a good deal to do with Elizabeth Taylor, playing Martha. She has shown previously, in some roles, that she could respond to the right director and could at least flagellate herself into an emotional state (as in "Suddenly, Last Summer"). Here, with a director who knows how to get an actor's confidence and knows what to do with it after he gets it, she does the best work of her career, sustained and urgent.

Of course, she has an initial advantage. Her acceptance of gray hair and her use of profanity make her seem to be acting even (figuratively) before she begins. ("Gee, she let them show her looking old! Wow, she just said 'Son of a bitch'! A star!") It is not the first time an American star has gotten mileage out of that sort of daring. Miss Taylor does not have qualities that, for instance, Uta Hagen had in the Broadway version, no suggestion of endlessly coiled involutions. Her venom is nearer the surface. But, under Mr. Nichols's hand, she gets vocal variety, never relapses out of the role, and she charges it with the utmost of her powers—which is an achievement for any actress, great or little.

As the younger man, George Segal gives his usual good terrier performance, lithe and snapping, with nice bafflement at the complexities of what he thought was simply a bad marriage. As his bland wife, Sandy Dennis is credibly bland.

Mr. Albee's play looks both better and a little worse under the camera's magnification. A chief virtue for me is that it is not an onion-skin play—it does not merely strip off layers, beginning at the surface with trifles and digging deeper as it proceeds. Of course, we learn more about the characters as we go, and almost all of it is fascinating; but, like its giant forebear, Strindberg's "Dance of Death," the play begins in in hell, and all the revelations and reactions take place within that landscape.

What does not wear well in the generally superb dialogue is the heavy lacing of vaudeville cross-talk, particularly facile non sequiturs. (Also, in Mr. Lehman's version, so much shouting and slamming takes place on the front lawn at four in the morning that we keep wondering why a neighbor doesn't wake up and complain.)

More serious is the heightened impression that the myth of the son is irrelevant to the play. It seems a device that the author tacked on to conclude matters as the slash and counterslash grew tired; a device that he then went back and planted earlier. Else why would Martha have told the other woman the secret of the son so glibly—not when she was angry or drunk—if she knew she was breaching an old and sacred compact with her husband? It obtrudes as an arbitrary action to justify the ending.

The really relevant unseen character is not the son; it is Martha's father, the president of the college. It is he whom she idolizes and measures her husband against, it is his presence George has to contend with in and out of bed. It is Daddy's power, symbolic in Martha, that keeps the visiting couple from leaving, despite circumstances that would soon have driven them out of any other house.

Awareness—of this truth about Daddy, of multiple other truths about themselves and their world—is the theme of this play: not the necessity of narcotic illusion about the son, but naked, peeled awareness. Under the vituperation and violence, under Martha's aggressive and self-punishing infidelties, this is the drama of a marriage flooded with more consciousness than the human psyche is at present able to bear.

Their world is too much with them, their selves are much too clear. It is the price to be paid for living in a cosmos of increasing clarity—which includes a clearer view of inevitable futilities. And, fundamentally, it is this desperation—articulated in childless, broken-hearted, demonically loving marriage—that Mr. Albee has crystallized in his flawed but fine play.

And in its forthright dealing with the play, this becomes one of the most scathingly honest American films ever made. Its advertisements say, "No one under 18 will be admitted unless accompanied by his parent." This may safeguard the children; the parents must take their chances.